It’s not stupid, he’s just remarkably intuitive when it come to the minds of teenage girls

If you follow my tumblr at all, you’d probably know I spent the last week of my Christmas break shotgunning like 50 episodes of Sailor Moon. It seems like the general theme of all the Malachite episodes was like “hey, let’s just set up a booth and say we’re giving free cookies to Moon Princesses” and then brainwashed bad guy Tuxedo Mask would be all “that’s stupid, you’re stupid” but then the plan would TOTALLY AND FLAWLESSLY FOOL THE SAILOR SCOUTS. He had the dumbest plan, but arguably the best record for very nearly exterminating the heroes, considering the only reason they escaped was because brainwashed Tuxedo mask kept breaking ranks and rescuing them (before angrily reminding them that he’s a bad guy who doesn’t like them)

Apparently this is my 150th comic. It’d be really cool if I could have got it up on time to celebrate but holy shit am I ever getting hammered with work from all directions this week. So if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go sleep for an hour before I go to my real job.

That was actually tried, it doesn’t work. Just because they look like ordinary girls in school girl outfits doesn’t mean they’re not much tougher than the average girl. Hell, most of the monsters they fight hit them with attacks that do far more damage than a bullet would, and that rarely even causes them noticable injuries.

They did, but one of the big sticking points was that the big bads never knew who the Sailor Senshi really were.

If a villain ever figured out who they were IRL, they were summarily killed, usually by their own superiors/teammates before the information could be passed along. See Jedite, Eugiel, and Nephlite, to name a few.

And/or it’s like the infamous transformation sequences: it’s actually stated at least once that they are /all/ transforming at the same speed Tuxedo Mask does (which is, in fact, /bam transformed/). The long sequences are only something people on this side of the fourth wall see.

this is only tangentially related, but I liked how in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha you actually get to see how the villains see them transforming once, and Nanoha barely escapes getting hit by a giant laser.
(this happens in the 2nd series and only once)

I say, just steal a suitcase nuke from the Russians, which seems totally possible for this guy, and kill ‘em all, because he already knows what town they live in. They would never see it coming, and anyone left in the crater alive you just hit at full force, and be done with it.

It works magically in the same principle as the Green Lanterns of DC Comics. To us, the outside viewers, they look the same, but there’s a glamor over their faces that makes them look different to other people. A person looking at a Sailor Senshi or Green Lantern sees a vague, non-descript face that they could not pick out of a line-up.

Was this how they made it in the dub? I lost interest in SM before the third season was picked up, so I’m mostly familiar with the original through fansubs. In the Japanese Eudial’s not killed by another villian, she’s straight-up murdered by Usagi. No superpowers, no transformation, nothing. Civilian!SailorMoon just shoves that b!tch right off a ledge. It was badass, and one of the defining points of the whole series.

You’re thinking of two different things. Usagi does shove Eudial into a pit at around that point — but she survives that in both versions. Eudial’s actual death comes in the next episode, when she’s driving away from her defeat, only to find Mimette’s sabotaged her car by cutting out the brake pedal. (The dub’s only change here was to say the brake pedal was destroyed by acid snails.)

Also, agreed on Sailor Moon. The only thing more ridiculous was “MOON PRINCESS….PENETRATION!” I’m not sure if that’s a direct translation and the Japanese was that bad, or if someone in the localization department thought it would be hilarious.

Hey, Talent and Cousins were HILARIOUS. I almost think they were getting crap past the radar with those two examples because NO ONE I know ever thought that talent meant anything other than boobs and Cousins was anything other than innuendo.

While the season one ending was certainly better in the original I wouldn’t call the english dub of it bad. Anyone with half a brain can tell the scouts are still dieing, and in fact it seems like they’re dieing and Beryl is stealing their souls, and with the more violent parts cut out some of their battles seem MORE impressive…well, okay only Mars where she seems to nuke that last two DD Girls and herself in one blast. Plus the music was better for the final battle in the dub, Cary On was a lot more final battle than the shows’ theme song. Other than that, Jupiter seems a little less badass, Venus is about equal, only Mercury goes out without a fight in the dub.

I think the best/worst Sailormoon related attack has got to be “Star Gentle Uterus” not kidding, that Sailor Star Maker uses. I love the series and it was my intro anime. But there is so much amazingly bad in the series, it’s fantastic.

Actually, this seems to be a pattern for a lot of children’s shows. Bad guy makes stupid plan (it’s almost never pointed out that it’s stupid), good guy(s) fall(s) for stupid plan, and either break out flawlessly, are saved by deus ex machina, or they die, but those really aren’t kids shows.

Or maybe we’re dealing with epically naïve heroes (deposits a quarter into the Epic Jar). Apparently naiveté doesn’t matter when you’re that good, or lucky, or skilled, or powerful, or whatever all of those show’s heroes were. It also happens in more adult things, like The Dark Tower (Tull. Seriously, freaking Tull) or Robin Hood (I think they cover that below).

And the heroes were definitely, definitely naïve! I’m pretty sure that Sailor Moon, at least, is only 14 years old in the show and I don’t think her friends and teammates are much older. Before the whole “now it is time to fight evil” thing I don’t think any of them had had anything really out of the ordinary happen in their lives; they had no life experience or frame of reference for the stuff that the bad guys pulled and frankly they seemed more concerned with other stuff happening in their lives most of the time.

I think of how easy it is to convince my Sailor Moon-aged younger sibling of silly falsehoods and I think of Sailor Moon and I shudder at how close her world must have come to destruction so many times. So it’s sure lucky she had awesome deus ex machina powers and friendship on her side!

The plan is still stupid, and the good guy is an idiot. I mean seriously, “intelligent” is not the word you usually use to describe main characters. “Brave” or “kind-hearted” doesn’t magically equal as smart.

It does look better. It’s something I noticed during the Bishounen-disease arc; Coelasquid can draw humans that are pretty as pie, just gorgeous–but their faces still look active and alive, and they are still powerfully expressive.

I suspect the fact that the Moon Princess is far stronger than anybody else might be the in-universe CAUSE of her being the politically strongest, rather than an effect, if one were to go back enough generations.

Poor Jadeite was just an entrepreneur. Every time he tried to start a new business it would be popular until out of the blue when the Sailor Scouts would roll up and smash the place. He likely couldn’t afford to pay them protection money.

Ever read All-Star Superman? While talking to Lois, Clark takes his glasses off, pulls open his shirt to show his Superman outfit, and flat-out tells her that he’s Superman. Her response? She doesn’t believe him, and thinks that Superman is doing a spot-on Clark Kent impression. She doesn’t even believe it when he starts explaining, in perfect detail, how he managed to pull off the “Clark and Superman in the same place” stunts.

In the manga the Starlights are actually girls pretending to be a male idol band to find their princess by basically stealing the hearts of teenaged girls (like until they find their princess’ heart or something)? Idk if the anime just decided to make them dudes that turned into girls for mysterious reasons or if it’s only in the English dub (which I suspect as my best mate watched it in Spanish as a kid and he thought that they were girls disguised as guys) where because of the whole “there will be no homosexuals in this anime, kthanx” ethos of the English dub a romantic relationship between Usagi/Serena and fem!Seiya would be a big no-no. Interestingly in the manga Uranus can change between a man/woman as s/he pleases and the “cousins” have a biologically theirs kid together, so maybe the translators got confused with that?

Zoisite on the other hand was turned into a girl for the English dub… cos, yeah, no gay here AT ALL, no siree bob, what anime were you watching? Sailor Moon? Nope that’s deffinately not full of them there gays, uh-uh. That pure confused me as a kid cos I was all like “but that’s deffinately a dude, why do they keep reffering to him as ‘she’? Sure he’s got a girly voice and a ponytail, but all the Generals look like they should be in a hair metal band so I don’t get it…”

GAWD, I know waaaaaaaaaay to much about Sailor Moon’s gender-swapping antics. I could probably write an essay about it… lol.

The transsexual Starlights are part of the original anime. I’m given to understand that they switched the Starlights to guys that turned into girls because lesbians are traditionally less acceptable than gay men in Japan, and so portraying them in a kids show would’ve been controversial. Then again, they didn’t edit the relationship between Haruka and Michiru at all, so then maybe it was because they were pretending to be men (aka sexism), but again, they showed Haruka unedited =x

Also, Uranus could not change her gender at will, but she had a very androgynous look, so how people viewed her gender would depend greatly on what she was wearing. If she dressed more feminine, they would see a bad-ass chick, and if she dressed masculine they’d see a pretty man.

YES! I love you… :D And Malachite is right, dude. Though giving away free cookies means he’d get a crap ton of Moon Princesses. But then all he has to do is CAPTURE THEM ALL and make them break! He’ll find the real deal eventually. :P Tuxedo Mask just wanted to be a snob. The simplest plans tend to work. Admittedly, stupid ones shouldn’t but… it’s teenage girls! They aren’t that hard to manipulate.

Happy sesquicentennial! Always glad when the little orange radar informs me a new comic is up… (though for whatever reason that seems to be slightly delayed form the rest of the general populace.) _ All the best with your work, remember, when life wants to hammer you, act like a an anvil, not a nail.

I never watched that much Sailor Moon, but I ended up watching the Mermaid Melody series when I was into cute and campy anime, and boy this plot structure sounds familiar. Though at least it sounds like Malachite came pretty close to sealing the deal – the Mermaid villains spent a lot of time coming up with elaborate ruses to draw the mermaids out, but almost never had any plan for what to do next besides jump out and say, “I have you now!” before being banished again.

You know who should appear in this comic? Captain America. I bet he’d get along super great with the Commander. Honestly, what Cap does in the Avengers comic is pretty similar to what the Commander does in this.

Though it would also be funny if they totally rubbed each other the wrong way and everyone is all “wtf why aren’t you guys the bestest friends ever?”

Of all the comic characters to get along with the commander, I’d think it would be Midnighter. Black ops training, married family man with a kid, not above ripping out the spines of his enemies and once traveled back in time to kick Hitler in the balls.

1. God, this strip is just so fucking dead on. One of my “favorites” is when they have a plan to lure the senshi out with an ice skating competition because the Moon Princess was a great ice skater (Buh?). The clincher is when the contest only accepts girls in groups of five. The ONLY time I’ve ever seen that “girls only in groups” rule implemented in the real world is Ladies’ night at a bar, and that’s to get horny dudes to buy drinks for the massive swaths of ladies (which makes lots of fiscal sense for bar owners). FUCK the Sailor girls were stupid. And having watched 4 out of 5 seasons, they never get smarter.

2. When did I miss that art on Tumblr? GODDAMN. Poster that.

3. I notice that comic of yours is lacking some color. And I might know a certain short, brown woman with more time than sense who might be good at coloring stuff–mumblemumblemumble…

Srsly. I don’t get how Usagi could be two steps away from roadkill while walking in a straight line with no cars around, and yet pull off those crazy transformation and attack dances and be awesome at sports. Being clutzy must be the most convincing disguise EVAR.

I don’t understand how anybody bought Clark Kent was a bumbling dork despite being the size of two linebackers strapped together. Seriously, you don’t get that big without working out and eating LOTS of raw eggs.

Frank Quietly (I think?) did a good job of combining poor posture with baggy clothes to make Clark Kent look chubby and diminutive. Which was interesting, because I’ve never seen an artist take that approach before but it’s probably the most believable. It’s not hard for a really barrel-chested guy to look out of shape in unflattering clothes, and no one would expect a timid fat kid to be Superman.

it was also canon for a while that he used some sort of unconscious super-hypnosis to make people forget about how similar-looking Superman and Clark Kent were. Super-hypnosis that worked through the TV as well.

Rei did indeed go to a catholic all-girls school, due to her estranged father. She’s the only one that continues to have a different uniform throughout the entire series, as well – everyone else ends up going to the same high school while she’s still in the catholic school. They were probably thinking of the identical late-series uniforms, as opposed to the four different early-series ones.

I think catholic schools might be regarded a bit differently over in Japan? I’m not totally sure, but I knew a guy who was a headmaster at this Japanese school that I think was a catholic one set up after the war for Americans abroad to send their kids too, but nowadays people send their kids there more to up their English language skills than for any kind of religious reason. I’m not sure if that’s a common thing or not.

You’re pretty much spot on. Not to mention that it is a good display of wealth, and that Japanese culture is not so rigid with its religious mixing up as the West is in general. There’s a phrase that the average Japanese person is “Shinto when they’re born, Christian when they’re married, Buddhist when they die.” It’s really just not as big of a deal!

I just remembered one really cool thing about Sailor Moon anime that is still unusual in animation: when not in uniforms, the cast had whole wardrobes of different outfits!
Mrs Takeuchi kept close attention to characters having individual styles in manga, but someone took extra effort to translate it to animated series (albeit Haruka’s taste became noticeably less feminine). Kudos to them. I hope remake will keep it that way.

If I wanted to notpick I’d point out that Queen Beryl and her generals never knew who the Sailor Scouts were so if they could do this they wouldn’t need to set a trap and could just steal the crystal at any time and kill her off. Whicvh makes the stupid trap funnier.

[smirks] It’s beyond me why those guys never did it like this
1. Deploy two monsters. One would be the Monster of the Week while the other would be hiding in shadows.
2 Monster of the Week starts causing havoc, Sailor Soldiers appear and take him out
3. Shadow Monster observes Sailor Soldiers from safe distance and follows them back home to learn their identities.
4. Take out each Sailor Soldier individually with superior numbers.
But it’s a Shoujo Manga so I probably shouldn’t expect tactical thinking or common sense…

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the anime, but the Senshi are actually pretty competent in the original manga. Their past selves were raised to be Princess Serenity’s guardian soldiers, and Luna does train them in the present.

I just want to second this. And third this. And so on. There have been several that I would love to put on my wall beside my Dr. McNinja Lumberjacks-Punching-Dinosaurs prints. They would complement one another so beautifully . . .

I’m not sure they’d ever bother with a live action show. The dubbing would be a nightmare, everythign would sound horrible if they tried to match mouth movements and ignoring mouth movements would be too distracting. They’d be more likjely to do their own. Which could ahve been really good or really bad dependong on how harsh the standards they had to adhere to were.

They have the silver crystal and there’s five of them. In the season finale they do beat them, four scouts killed in action and Moon suicides to take out Beryl. They just manage to get a surprsie resurection because Moon released so much power from the crystal.

well looks like i just got a crash course in sailor moon. All I knew before was that the original Japanese version was never intended for kids. The only reason I knew that much was because my sword dealer got a pissed off call from his sister after he picked it up as a present for his niece.

To be fair, didn’t most of these plans fail because they had no idea what they were looking for and always picked the wrong chick? “For best moon princess, we elect serenas non-superpowered classmate…again.”

Commenting to let you know that, despite having read multitudes of comics over the last 15 years, this is now my undisputed choise for favorite comic of all time (overall, because how could I pick just one of your installments when there have been so many epic ones -oops there’s one for the jar).

i may be late in reply, haven’t bother to check previous posts to see if this question has already been asked and answer not sure if you’ll notice, but.
when you say shotgunning 50+ episodes of sailor moon, i hope you weren’t watching the 50+ episodes in their english rendition. if so i would highly suggest watching them in thir JP (english) subtitles fan translation (if any) cause the enlish rendition has been horribly butchered beyond comparison from their “original” contents.

Sure I was watching them in English, I can’t read subtitles while I work. But I’ve seen them in their original Japanese before and you know what? It’s uh, virtually the exact same experience. Some genders were switched, sure, but changing the pronouns they use on Zoicite or Fisheye doesn’t do anything that being told “hey you know that character used to be a dude, right?” can’t. It’s still a bland monster of the day formula where every character spends two thirds of the episode putting on superhero clothes and launching attacks at the bad guy du jour with all of forty minutes of actual plot per season. The whole cousins thing? Well, those two are pretty obviously a couple in body language and action, at that point the “cousins” thing just seems like a running joke of some lame coverup they think they’re fooling people with. That big fight against Queen Beryl that everyone says was butchered, look, if you can’t tell those characters are actually getting killed, you’re five years old (which was probably the point of the edits).

I already responded to folks whining about the dub on tumblr, so I’ll just repost this summary of my first experience as a little fourteen year old watching Japanese Sailor Moon for the first time;“I think the Movie with Fiore was my first experience watching the show uncut, because everybody told me it was SUCH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE. I think the biggest alteration was a line where in the English version they’re sitting around a table saying something like “So Darian and Fiore were friends?” but in the Japanese version the line is more like “Were Mamo-Chan and Fiore that kind of friend?” and in the context of a story where the villain is relentlessly trying to kidnap the hero’s boyfriend and kill her so he can have her man all to himself, it’s not that hard to figure out what’s going on without a character flat-out saying “I think that dude is mad crushing on your boyfriend, Sailor Moon”. The plot is still “alien dude has an unhealthy obsession with Tuxedo mask, gets duped by a plant monster, Sailor moon and friends spend ten minutes transforming and then one-hit-KO all the monsters, alien dude realizes he dun did a bad thing and floats off as a little… bubble… kid… ghost…. thing… or something” and the only major difference was I couldn’t doodle while I watched it.”

So yeah, you know, go ahead and prefer the unedited subs all you want, but there’s no need to talk down to people watching it in English because it’s really not nearly as different as people like to pretend it is.

“but there’s no need to talk down to people watching it in English”
now, where in my post did i talk down to people watching it in english :/
sorry if i came off a bit “rude” and “elitist” wasn’t trying to come off as such. i was merely making a suggestion. but i guess i came about saying it in the wrong way.

I watched all the Sailor Moon episodes a couple of years ago, literally spent my days in my room watching subbed episodes. And at the time I never really thought how ridiculously easy it was to trap the Sailor Scouts. xD

Seriously, you would have thought that by the 50th time falling for some silly plan, they’d have gotten wise to the whole thing. Still, love the comic!